Ivy Grew Over the Street Sign

It's like coming back to your old house years after you've moved and seeing the damage, realizing that it was so much smaller and more run-down than you remember.

Submitted:Aug 6, 2007
Reads: 108
Comments: 0
Likes: 0

The backyard is empty. All of us neighborhood kids used to play out
there, but we're not those kids anymore; we're high school teens
with "opinions". We vote straight-ticket for death or war, since
that one candidate we read about on CNN.com seemed nice and all our
friends are Democrats anyway. We think we're qualified, we puff out
our chests and call ourselves responsible citizens. Being
closed-minded is an art we've all perfected, and we paint murals of
ourselves as the exception to the rule. What we refuse to accept is
that we are not the exception. What we don't say is that we made
the rule.

I used to jump on the trampoline in my backyard with my sister. Now
it's full of seventeen year olds laying side-by-side,
layer-on-layer, trying to accidentaly touch each other and
accidentaly stick their tounge in each other's mouths. Hey, it's a
crowded trampoline, things happen. Down the street my best friend
Johnny- the one I married in second grade and the first boy I ever
hugged that wasn't in my family- smokes up with his friends. They
take hits and listen to Brand New, and I never told him that I
think his new hair makes him look like a girl because maybe that's
what he was going for. I don't know these people anymore, and
whoever they are now are only ghosts of the kids that used to play
in the street. Now we're the ones interrupting football games when
we drive our cars down the road; we're the ones waking up the
neighborhood with drunken ramblings. We're the ones broken by hope
and deserted by faith; we fit the stereotype and we love it.